Realistic 3D scans from your phone

Impressive.

Sony has revealed new smartphones that can create detailed 3D scans of almost any object using the phone's camera. The company said the innovation was possible thanks to the power of the processor in its latest handsets. It unveiled a series of new devices at the Ifa technology show in Berlin.

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-41111442/sony-phone-app-takes-3d-clone-snaps

Cheap drone deliveries can save lives

The content is fine but the editing isn't. Not only does it have the dreaded excess of one-sentence "paragraphs" but it jumps randomly between topics. So I've fixed it.

US robotics company Zipline, which launched the world's first commercial drone delivery service, in Rwanda, says it is close to expanding to Tanzania. It has been delivering emergency blood supplies within Rwanda since 2016. Chief executive Keller Rinaudo told the TEDGlobal conference that he was in talks with Tanzania's government to open four distribution centres.

Mr Rinaudo said he hoped a deal would allow the start-up to fly a range of medical products to thousands of Tanzania's health centres. "Having an agile supply chain for healthcare makes a big difference in improving access and empowering doctors," he said at the TED event in Arusha, Tanzania.

Billions of people lack adequate access to essential medical products such as blood and vaccines, and more than five million children die every year because of a lack of access to basic medical products, according to Mr Rinaudo. The company charges between $15 and $45 (£11.60 to £34.85) per delivery, depending on product weight, urgency and distance. "Think about what it would cost to make that journey by car, and that is about what it will cost," said Mr Rinaudo.

In Rwanda, the company is serving 12 hospitals via a central distribution centre. Doctors or medical staff requiring blood contact Zipline online or via a WhatsApp message. Its deliveries then take an average of 20 minutes. The company says it receives multiple orders each day.

"It is a magically simple experience for doctors. We send them a message saying the blood is one minute away, and they walk outside to collect it," said Mr Rinaudo. The drones are launched from a catapult and fly below 500ft (152m) to avoid airspace used by passenger planes. They have an operational range of 150km (93 miles). The blood is delivered by parachute, and the drones do not land.

Sooo.... they just keep flying then ?

However, the World Bank has questioned the Silicon Valley-based company's true motivation. "Demonstration of real commercial deals in Africa will help raise its track record for the US market," said Edward Anderson, a senior technologist at the bank in Tanzania. He said that Zipline was "doing wonders in terms of making drones real in Africa" but questioned whether the deal - a commercial one requiring the government to pay per delivery - would go through.

But he [Mr Rinaudo] made no apology for pursuing a commercial strategy. "One of the most important things we are trying to show is that it is possible to tackle this problem in entrepreneurial ways. "It doesn't just have to be NGOs [non-governmental organisations] and foreign aid working on these big global issues."

If the deal goes ahead, the centres would open over the next four years, allowing blood, vaccines and other medical items to be flown to health centres. Zipline says it is also hoping to expand its service in Rwanda to deliver further medical products.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40935773

Astronomy in Houdini

Master's student project on visualising astronomy FITS files in Houdini, for which I provided a very small amount of advice.

https://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/MastersProjects/MSc17/07/index.html

Astronomical data from satellites and ground telescopes are publicly available on a number of online portals and are free to use. Many interesting data, ranging from relatively small star clusters, to dark matter maps, to maps of entire sections of galaxies containing billions of stars are available. Their usage is somewhat limited, and the software to parse the data are developed specifically to serve the astronomy community. The data formats are not made for portability or speed, but for longevity and ease-of-use. Hence, the files can be a few megabytes to several gigabytes in size. Many astronomy software provides parsing and viewing of such files, but most do not cater to more than one format. The approach is more scientific, with the focus being on extraction of data points, potting graphs and in some cases, a bare-minimum 2D or 3D visualization. For this project, similar concepts have been applied, as well as general astronomical data analysis theory, to bring similar capabilities into Houdini, and build assets for use in visual effects. Three of the most widely used formats in astronomy have been chosen - FITS, CSV and AMR. The motivation for doing this project is an interest in astronomy and desire to learn Python.

https://vimeo.com/230309447

Terry Pratchett REALLY doesn't want you to see his internet history

Dammit, man !

A hard drive containing unfinished works by Terry Pratchett has been crushed by a steamroller, as per instructions left by the fantasy novelist. It is thought up to 10 incomplete novels were flattened at the Great Dorset Steam Fair. The six-and-a-half tonne Lord Jericho was used to roll over the hard drive several times before a concrete crusher finished off the remains.

Pratchett died aged 66 in March 2015. The creator of the Discworld series had been battling Alzheimer's disease. Before vanquishing the hard drive, Rob Wilkins, the writer's long-serving assistant, tweeted that he was "about to fulfil my obligation to Terry".

Richard Henry, curator of Salisbury Museum, said: "The steamroller totally annihilated the stone blocks underneath but the hard drive survived better than expected so we put it in a stone crusher afterwards which I think probably finally did it in". He said Pratchett did not want his unpublished works to be completed by someone else and released.

He added: "It's something you've got to follow, and it's really nice that they have followed his requests so specifically. It's surprisingly difficult to find somebody to run over a hard drive with a steamroller. I think a few people thought we were kidding when I first started putting out feelers to see if it was possible or not."

The pieces of the hard drive will go on display in the Terry Pratchett: His World Exhibition at the museum on 16 September.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-41093066

50 years of VLBI at Arecibo

Found another Arecibo flyer hiding in my inbox.

Saving FAST from tourists : my solution

According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), government statistics released this month show that in the first half of 2017, nearly four million tourists visited “FAST” (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope). Tourism officials estimate that 10 million tourists will visit the the highly-sensitive device this year. “That will be as many as the tourists to the Great Wall in Beijing,” the official announced. “Here we have a new wonder of the world.” China did such a great job of building something impressive, that its core function is at risk of being nullified.

I suggest building an identical but non-functional decoy telescope closer to a major city. With blackjack, and hookers... in fact, forget the decoy telescope !

http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-radio-telescope-has-a-massive-touris-1798389051

No you twerps, 70% of us don't want a hard Brexit

TLDR : That claim that everyone is suddenly in favour of a hard Brexit is complete and total bollocks. It's statistical games taken to a whole new level. Nor do they even suggest people want to expel foreigners.

This was not a conventional opinion polling exercise in which a sample of respondents are asked a straightforward question and their answers published after some standard statistical adjustments for national representativeness. Instead, it was a complex and innovative process designed to “reveal” people’s underlying preferences when faced with forced trade-offs over potential outcomes.

Each person was presented with two menus of Brexit-related outcomes and asked to choose which one they preferred. The option of “neither” was not available... The mix of the two menus offered to respondents was randomly generated. After their first choice, respondents were asked to repeat the process a further four times, every time with two new randomly-generated menus of options.

One of these menu options was the “future rights of current EU nationals in Britain”. And one of the extreme options presented for this category was “all must leave”. And here is the important part. No one was directly asked: “Do you think all EU nationals should leave Britain after Brexit”?

Instead, this was an option that cropped up as part of large bundle of outcomes that respondents were asked to choose between. On the favourability index the researchers constructed this option got a score of about 29 per cent for Remainers and 42 per cent for Leavers. But that does not mean 29 per cent of Remainers support the deportation of EU nationals.As the researchers stress: “These values cannot and should not be interpreted as the raw or unconstrained percentage of respondents supporting a given feature level; instead it measures the degree to which individuals trade-off any given level for all of the others.”

It gets even worse for the hard Brexit conclusion :

As well as asking respondents to choose between various randomly-generated baskets of outcomes, the researchers also presented them with three “fixed” baskets. And these were constructed by the researchers to roughly resemble three Brexit outcomes often described as “soft”, “hard” and “no deal”. Respondents were forced to state a preference. They were not given the option of saying “don’t know” or “neither”.

Further, respondents were not given any sense by the framing of the question of the consequences of the choice of basket. For instance, in the “no deal” basket there were superficially attractive items such as “no payment” to the EU and rather anodyne-sounding ones such “some administrative barriers to trade and 2.5 per cent tariffs”. There was no mention of the fact that “no deal” would mean the UK being in breach of its international treaty obligations. There was no hint at the travel chaos and economic pain that would inevitably follow such a “cliff-edge” outcome. Similarly, the hard Brexit scenario contained no mention of the economic pain relative to the soft scenario.

http://www.independent.co.uk/infact/brexit-report-latest-remainers-deport-eu-citizens-uk-back-hard-european-union-study-explained-a7892216.html

An early and spectacular attempt to measure parallax

Then came the Monument. It was supposed to be a grand acknowledgement of the fire, but at the time, “what Hooke really wanted was to build a very long telescope” says Maria Zack, a mathematician at Nazarene University, California. In the end, he decided to combine both.

The Monument to the Great Fire of London consists of a towering, 202-foot (61-metre) stone column, decorated with dragons and topped with a flaming golden orb. On the inside, a striking spiral staircase stretches all the way to the top, twisting up like the peel of an apple carved in a single, continuous ribbon.

Back in the 17th Century, scientists were still arguing about whether the Sun revolved around the Earth or the other way around. Like all rational people today, Hooke was thoroughly convinced by the latter. But no one could prove it. In theory, it should have been easy, thanks to “astronomical parallax”, an apparent shift in the position of one object, against a backdrop of another.

If the Earth changes its position relative to the stars, while circling the Sun – then they should appear to jump from one place to another over the course of a year.

The catch is just how tiny these movements are. Take Gamma Draconis, a giant orange-coloured star around 900 trillion miles (1.4 quadrillion km) away. Instead of measuring the movement of objects in the sky, from planets to satellites, in metres or inches, astronomers divide up the heavens like the face of an imaginary clock. Every six months, the star moves north or south in the sky at a scale equivalent to the hands moving 22 ten-thousandths of a second. To magnify parallax enough to see it, you need a very large telescope indeed.

“He was trying to keep the two lenses aligned, 200ft apart, with only limited ways to anchor them to the telescope,” says Zack. Worse still, the Monument is next to Fish Street Hill, which was the main route to London Bridge at the time. This was one of the busiest roads in London, mere metres from his highly sensitive scientific experiment. In the end, vibrations from the traffic ruined everything.


http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170810-the-medieval-lab-hidden-inside-a-famous-monument

Goldfish survive frozen lakes by getting themselves drunk

I guess this would explain their three-second memory spans, if that wasn't a complete myth.

Scientists have decoded the secrets behind a goldfish's ability to survive in ice-covered lakes. They've worked out how and why the fish turn lactic acid in their bodies into alcohol, as a means of staying alive. Some goldfish were found to have levels well above legal drink-driving limits in many countries.

Thank goodness they don't know how to drive, then.

In most animals there is a single set of proteins that channel carbohydrates towards the mitochondria, which are the power packs of cells. In the absence of oxygen, the consumption of carbohydrates generates lactic acid, which the goldfish can't get rid of and which kills them in minutes.

Luckily, these fish have evolved a second set of proteins that take over in the absence of oxygen and convert the lactic acid to alcohol, which can then be dispersed through the gills. "The second pathway is only activated through lack of oxygen," author Dr Michael Berenbrink from the University of Liverpool, UK, told BBC News.

"The ice cover closes them off from the air, so when the pond is ice-covered the fish consumes all the oxygen and then it switches over to the alcohol." The longer they are in freezing, airless conditions the higher the alcohol levels in the fish become. "If you measure them in the field the blood alcohol goes up above 50mg per 100 millilitres, which is the drink-drive limit in Scotland and northern European countries," said Dr Berenbrink. "So they are really 'under the influence'."

They may not know how to drive, but they sure know how to live !

Scientists have also calculated for fun, how long it would take to produce an alcoholic drink from the fish excretions. "If you put them in a beer glass and closed them off, it would take 200 days to get it up to 4%," said Dr Berenbrink. "In nature, it just would not happen."

By next year that'll have replaced the avocado smoothie as the drink of choice for all self-respecting hipsters, I guarantee it.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40899192

The accidental Illuminati conspiracy was an attempt to promote critical thinking

At the time, Wilson worked for the men’s magazine Playboy. He and Thornley started sending in fake letters from readers talking about this secret, elite organisation called the Illuminati. Then they would send in more letters – to contradict the letters they had just written.

“So, the concept behind this was that if you give enough contrary points of view on a story, in theory – idealistically – the population at large start looking at these things and think, ‘hang on a minute’,” says Bramwell. “They ask themselves, ‘Can I trust how the information is presented to me?’ It’s an idealistic means of getting people to wake up to the suggested realities that they inhabit – which of course didn’t happen quite in the way they were hoping.”

Today, it’s one of the world’s most widely punted conspiracy theories; even celebrities like Jay-Z and Beyoncé have taken on the symbolism of the group themselves, raising their hands into the Illuminati triangle at concerts. It’s hardly instigated the mind-blowing epiphany – the realisation that it’s all fake – which the proponents of Discordianism had originally intended.

“Particularly in South Asia, conspiracy theories have been a mechanism for the government to control the people. In the West, it’s typically been the opposite; they’ve been the subject of people who lack agency, who lack power, and it’s their lacking of power that gives rise to conspiracy theories to challenge the government. Like with 9/11. If people lack power, conspiracy theories can sow the seeds of social protest and allow people to ask questions. The big change now is that politicians, particularly Donald Drumpf, are starting to use conspiracies to mobilise support.”

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170809-the-accidental-invention-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy

Indiana Jones, successful archaeologist

If we ignore the Siva Stones, which Jones seems to have always planned to return to the village from which they were stolen, Jones’ success rate at converting “this object is probably mythical” into “this object is part of a publicly accessible museum collection” rises to one in five. His methods may be unorthodox by modern standards, but 20% is a lot higher than average, considering that we remember the names of archaeologists who do this even once.

Jones, who we’re led to believe works at an old-money institution, if not an Ivy than a near-Ivy, has a classroom of at least two-thirds women...Suggesting all those women are in Jones’ class because they want to sleep with him—a common assertion—rejects out of hand the possibility that these women are legitimately excited about archaeology as Jones presents it, which seems like a skeevy and disrespectful move to me.

Bwahahahah !

Another anecdote: I’ve had wonderful professors, I’ve had brilliant professors, but without doubt the most badass professor I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with was Doctor Kimberly Bowes, a late classical archaeologist who spent a year teaching what amounts to introductory Mediterranean political science and history. Dr. Bowes knew a billion languages and she spent her fieldwork being lowered down pits into buried villages and subterranean temples of blood-drinking cults (I mean, Christian churches, but, you know, same diff). Having swallowed the “real archaeologists aren’t Indiana Jones” pill along with every skeptical kid my age, I thought she must be the exception, the Sole Awesome Archaeologist. Then a colleague of hers arrived one day to watch her class—he rode in on his motorcycle, with leather boots and a lanky figure and the kind of five-o-clock shadow actors pay people to help them fake.

Wonderful.

http://www.tor.com/2017/08/09/defending-indiana-jones-archaeologist/

Google's sexist memo is sexist, says biologist

Here we have a genuine expert in the field presenting their commentary. An evolutionary biologist, not a certain popular female theoretical physicist. Here's the TLDR from the article, but it's well worth reading in its entirety.

Yes, men and women are biologically different — which doesn’t mean what the author thinks it does.

The article perniciously misrepresents the nature and significance of known sex differences to advance what appears to be a covert alt-right agenda. More specifically, it :
-argues for biologically determined sex differences in personality based on extremely weak evidence
-completely fails to understand the current state of research on sex differences, which is based in neuroscience, epigenetics and developmental biology
-argues that cognitive sex differences influence performance in software engineering, but presents no supporting evidence. Available evidence does not support the claim.
-fails to acknowledge ways in which sex differences violate the narrative of female inferiority; this shows intellectual dishonesty
-assumes effective meritocracy in its argument, ignoring both a mountain of conflicting scientific literature and its own caveats (which I can only assume were introduced to placate readers, since their incompatibility with the core thesis is never resolved)
-makes repugnant attacks on compassion and empathy
-distorts and misuses moral foundations theory for rhetorical purposes
-contains hints of racism
-paradoxically insists that authoritarianism be treated as a valid moral dimension, whilst firmly rejecting any diversity-motivated strategy that might remotely approach it.
-ultimately advocates rejecting all morality insofar as it might compromise the interests of a group.

https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-anti-diversity-document-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017/answer/Suzanne-Sadedin

Brexit means...

Found on the internet.

Putting yourself in other people's shoes is racist, apparently

FaceApp has removed a feature which changed people's ethnicity in selfies less than 24 hours after updating it.The app, which launched in early 2017, changes photos with filters to make users look older, younger or swap gender. But its latest feature was criticised for being racist within minutes of going live. It allowed people to change their faces to look more black, Asian, Indian or Caucasian in photos.

I kindof want to try this.... I mean, being able to see what I'd look like if I was another race or gender seems like a fundamentally good thing for diversity. Granted, though, calling it a "blackface" app (if that's what they did, that word only appears in the headline) and a " "hot" filter which lightens skin tones" are clearly racist, shite marketing.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/40887229/faceapp-launches-blackface-feature-then-deletes-it-after-social-backlash

Refugees and the dangers of self-fulfilling prophecies

I got to visit Noura Bittar at her home only after I promised to ignore the mess. She is a proud woman, and, in fact, her small flat in Copenhagen seemed pretty tidy, given that she runs a catering business from here, while also looking after a new-born baby. And yet, it was easy to understand Noura's need to retain a sense of dignity.

She fled to Denmark from the civil war in Syria, and is troubled by the way people often perceive those classed as "refugees". "You have that stereotyping… that we came here to take their jobs and money. And I just want to say, 'No, that's not us.'"

Noura set out to dispel that image, despite still reeling from the fighting back in her home town of Homs, where friends were killed and close family members injured. She set up a catering business, hoping it would introduce more Danes to the cuisine of her homeland, while making her financially self-sufficient in the process. But even while she was building up the company, and not yet turning a profit, Noura began offering free cookery classes to Danish women who had been victims of rape or domestic abuse. "Danish society gave us security. It gave us a place to stay. I wanted to say thank you."

... Watching this development was a young academic researcher, Conor Clancy. He was doing a master's thesis on management and entrepreneurship, and came up with an idea that was, to say the least, going against the grain. He thought the new refugee arrivals should be seen as a resource, not a burden. "Our research showed that when they're in the camps, [refugees] show a lot of entrepreneurial attributes," he says. "They come with passion and drive."

Mr Clancy formed Refugee Entrepreneurs Denmark, which helps new arrivals such as Noura to start their own business, supporting them with information, advice and general encouragement. He hopes this will enable refugees to become independent, no longer the "burden" some Danes seem to fear. And, more ambitiously, he believes these businesses will eventually create jobs that employ local Danes. "This will put more tax into the system," he says, "but also help break down the wall between refugees and their host nation."

Martin Henriksen believes refugees are already getting too much support. An MP for the nationalist Danish People's Party, he took me for a stroll round the Norrebro area of Copenhagen, where many refugees have settled. "A lot of people here have a different cultural background, religious background - they speak another language," he says, pointing out the number of homes with drawn curtains. He takes this as symbolic of separate lives that some foreign-born residents lead.

The DPP came second in the last Danish election, on a platform of opposing immigration and the granting of asylum. Mr Henriksen rejects the idea that refugees can be a resource. "The majority don't have the will," he says.

What do you imagine these people were doing in their home country before they trekked thousands of miles to reach northern Europe ? Are you worried that you have somehow acquired the world's most hard-working, determined benefit cheats ? People who have walked thousands of miles rather than find a job... ?

You can either try and help these people integrate and become upstanding tax-paying members of society, or you can shun them. The latter is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you refuse to let them integrate, then they won't. They'll become the foreign parasites you fear so much not because of their nature, but because you refused to believe they could be anything else.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40803432

Where did all these stupid people come from ?

Good article overall, but would have been better with about half the number of anecdotes. Far too long to attempt a summary, so I will just add a few key points about the scientific, materialist, rational world view :

- The basic assumption is that the world is objective, measurable, and real. Our knowledge of the world is imperfect and incomplete, but out measurements are still meaningful. Everything else has to be understood within the framework of this assumption. And yes, it is an assumption. That does not invalidate it.
- Scientific findings are evidenced-based and provisional because of this imperfect knowledge. Explanatory mechanisms are subject to revision pending new evidence, but this does not mean that all ideas are equal. It doesn't even mean that some ideas can't be rejected or accepted absolutely, within the basic overarching assumption.
- Consensus is achieved not through democratic vote but through independently attacking ideas as far as is reasonable. The primary goal is which idea is best, not which is right or wrong. Those cases, though possible, are much harder to establish.
- People ask, "Who watches the watchers ? Why do scientific ideas deserve this exalted position ? Don't we need to know which idea is really true to proceed - surely "best" just isn't good enough ?" as though this were complicated. It is not. Who watches your doctor ? Who watches your aeronautical engineer ? How does an atomic bomb work ? The answers are that everyone watches everyone else, public and experts alike, but more weight is given to expert opinions. It may not seem sensible that we can proceed on a "best guess" basis... but it works. Incomplete understanding does not mean no understanding at all; you don't have to know the name of your local librarian's aunt's cat to work out how to take out a book, and you don't need to know everything about atomic physics to work out how to wipe out a city. You can see the effects for yourself every time you get medical treatment, fly on an aeroplane, or right now while you're reading this on the internet. If you prefer the evidence of your own mind to your senses, then you are lost.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/

The rocket scientist who was also a witch

This should be one to watch. I've read the book, the show sounds promising.

Jack Parsons’ pioneering efforts in rocket science ultimately led to his co-founding the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the outskirts of Pasadena, CA. As George Pendle, who wrote the book on which this series is based, explains in Motherboard, “JPL is not part of some Joss Whedon-esque occult-industrial complex. It does not mingle science with the supernatural. Yet one of its founders did.”

When Parsons died in 1952 at the young age of 37 in a chemical explosion, newspapers particularly focused on some of the odder elements of his history: notably, that it seemed like he wanted to fuse technology and the particulars of his spiritualism. Beyond the aspects of Parson’s life that spark cultural amusement (and maybe a bit of fear), he also happened to be among the key figures paving the way for space travel. But of course the more bizarre and salacious components of his story are the types of things that could make for excellent television: and so, yes, Parsons was very actively involved in Ordo Templi Orientis, the society led by Aleister Crowley, founder of the libertarian-adjacent religion Thelema, and proponent of “sex magick.” This magick manifested in orgiastic “Gnostic Masses,” wherein, incidentally, cakes made from menstrual blood were consumed. Eventually, Parsons became the society’s West Coast leader, and held massive parties at his mansion that was dubbed the Parsonage.

Motherboard quotes a letter from him to another member of OTO:
"It has seemed to me that if I had the genius to found the jet propulsion field in the US, and found a multi-million dollar corporation and a world renowned research laboratory, then I should also be able to apply this genius in the magical field."

When some of Parsons’ more unruly professional characteristics were seen as a security threat, he was bought out of Aerojet, the company he created, and expelled from JPL. He began to drop his focus on rockets and move more fervently into magic-centricity — to a point that even made some members of the OTO worried. But therein, he became the perfect friend to the sci-fi novelist who’d develop a penchant for monetizing odd tales as expensive religions: L. Ron Hubbard.

So, yeah, it’s sort of astonishing that this hasn’t been made into a series yet, which brings us back to the Lowery project. According to Indiewire, CBS All Access announced at the Television Critics Association press tour that the series is titled Strange Angel, the same as Pendle’s book. Which part of Parsons’ crazy, ripe-for-TV-adaptation history Heyman will decide to focus on remains to be seen. But honestly, I’d watch any of it.

It's likely not been made into a series previous because Scientologists do not react well to criticism. This should be interesting.

http://flavorwire.com/608866/a-ghost-story-director-david-lowery-is-making-a-tv-series-about-rocket-scientistoccultist-party-animal-jack-parsons

Rescuing old astronomy data

A program to help you rescue old data. Looks useful !

WebPlotDigitizer has been continuously developed since its creation in 2011 by Ankit Rohatgi at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA). This software uses affine transformations to map pixel location in the image to data points on a figure based on the calibration points provided by the user. Various image processing algorithms included with this software can be used to extract large number of data points from uploaded figures with great precision.

In order to extract a spectra from an archival paper, the first step is to create an image that isolates the spectrum, including the horizontal and vertical axes. The presence of text and legends won’t interfere. The software will ask the user to select a few known points on the axes (2 points on the X-axis and 2 more points on the Y-axis for a 2D spectrum) and enter the corresponding values.

To acquire the data after plot axes calibration, several options are available. A tedious option is to manually select data points on the image (particularly helpful for low-resolution spectra with error bars). An alternative, faster method, is to use the automatic mode. In the automatic mode, the user can set up and execute an extraction algorithm that can differentiate between the data points and the image background and identify several data points in a short time. A background mode also allows the algorithms to include everything except the background color as potential data points, a very useful feature in the case of overlapping curves/spectra of different colors.


https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02025

The amazing shrinking hedgehog

Yay !

A hedgehog that became inflated to twice its size has been returned to the wild after being "popped" in Cheshire. The hedgehog, known as Monty, was diagnosed with "balloon syndrome" - a rare condition caused by gas collecting under the skin. He was treated at Stapeley Grange Wildlife Centre in Nantwich after being found in Doncaster.

An inspector said the hedgehog's condition was "the worst" she had ever seen. Staff at the centre named him "Monty" after the Montgolfier brothers who invented the hot air balloon. Due to his condition, Monty had been unable to walk and could not get all four paws on the ground at the same time - which meant he ended up walking round in circles.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-40849418

Teaching crows to fly

Soon, she'll be learning how to fly other birds.

Even when the feathers grew back, Nugget wasn’t able to take off properly—she would often try to fly, crash-land, and break her feathers again. One of the other study crows, named Dara, also had some trouble flying, while the rest of the crows were fully flighted. When Davie designed their enclosure, she did so with these varying levels of mobility in mind. “We wanted to make sure that the exhibit was long enough and tall enough to sustain prolonged flight and let the flighted birds get to high perches,” she says. “Then we built ramps up to different levels in the exhibit, and branches that were designed in a sort of stepwise manner.”

What began as a simple routine grew more complex as she brought in different pieces of equipment: “She first started off rapidly moving her wings up and down, and then would do a little hop,” says Davie. After a few weeks of that, she added a run-and-jump, and then a hop from a high branch to a lower one and then back again. Eventually, she added a final move: she would climb up the wire mesh wall of the cage, and glide from there to the ground.

Nugget knew how to pace herself. Reviewing the hour-long tapes they made of the crows’ behaviour every morning, the researchers saw her repeat this workout for 15 minutes or half an hour, and then spend the rest of the time doing regular crow things: “hiding food, eating food, wandering around,” and hanging out with the other birds, says Davie.

The training paid off. In early December, a couple of weeks after the researchers had spotted her climbing the cage wire—and six months after she first started performing the routine—the researchers watched, surprised, as Nugget took off from the ground and flew straight up to a high perch. “We were just like, ‘Oh my god, you did it!,’” Davie recalls. “After that, we didn’t see her practice behaviour again."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/crow-taught-herself-to-fly

What do you get if you cross a rocket with a raccoon ?

More on the company hoping to launch satellites from Snowdonia.

I would love them to succeed, but my oh my the opening graphic and poor English (it isn't any better on the rest of the site) doth not fill me with confidence. So far as I can tell, they have no hardware and a team consisting entirely of managers. No mention of any aereopsace engineers, though their bios are all on linkedin which I refuse to join because it's Spam Central. Their animations are OK, but... I'm almost tempted to write to them and say, "look, I'll give you this better graphic on the house because you can't use that terrible font, boring slogan, incorrect use of an article and weirdly capitalised letters on the front page of your website, that's just wrong."

Anyway :

We are developing a High Altitude launching system, a stratospheric balloon will lift a self operative platform from where to deploy the launcher. Saving cost by skipping the highest density part of the atmosphere and gaining altitude up to 35 km, smaller and cheaper rocket will deliver the payload into the required orbits. Based on existing technology, improved and adapted to maximize performance and provide affordable access to space.

The animation says it can deliver 150 kg to LEO and the first stage is fully reusable (with parachutes, no fancy rocket-powered landing system).

However, credit where credit is due :

Innovating, researching and developing feasible “Rockoon” technology...

Rockoons !!!
http://b2-space.com/#projects

Malcom was right

In extreme conditions, iife finds a way...

In a surreal landscape of colours, dominated by luminescent ponds of yellows and greens, boiling hot water bubbles up like a cauldron, whilst poisonous chlorine and sulphur gases choke the air. Known as the “gateway to hell”, the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia is scorchingly hot and one of the most alien places on Earth. Yet a recent expedition to the region has found it is teeming with life.

In the Dallol crater, the geothermal activity increases the temperature even further, so the brine water reaching the surface is about 100C. As well as the sweltering heat, the scientists have to cope with toxic hydrogen sulphide gas, not to mention chlorine vapour burning their airways and choking their lungs. They must all wear gas masks to work there for any period of time.

In March 2017, Cavalazzi’s lab and their colleagues found life in Danakil, after they managed to isolate and extract DNA from bacteria. They found that the bacteria are “polyextremophiles”, which means they are adapted to extreme acidity, high temperatures and high salinity all at once. It is the first absolute confirmation of microbial life in the Danakil acidic pools.

One of the scientists’ discoveries looks set to establish a new record. The team found life in a pool where the acidity was measured as zero pH. That pool is the most acidic place where life has been found on Earth. The previous record was in the Rio Tinto, a river in Spain that has a pH of 2.

Microbes discovered in Yellowstone and other hydrothermal environments have evolved adaptations to help them survive. These include having proteins and enzymes that are more chemically stable at higher temperatures. This can be achieved by having more bonds and connections between amino acids, the building blocks that make up proteins. It may be that the bacteria in the Danakil Depression hot springs have acquired similar adaptations.

Whatever the case, the scientists’ findings may help us understand how life could have arisen on other planets and moons. “On Mars, you have mineral deposits and sulphate deposits similar to those seen in the Danakil Depression. You also have active brine flowing periodically,” says Cavalazzi. So by studying in which extreme Earthly environments life can survive, and how it does so, we can start to figure out which regions of planets like Mars might be habitable.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170803-in-earths-hottest-place-life-has-been-found-in-pure-acid

Escaping Wales the hard way

Satellites could soon be launched into space from Snowdonia. B2Space and Snowdonia Aerospace Centre want to create 93 specialist jobs at Llanbedr airfield, Gwynedd. The number is based on it launching 30 satellites a year by 2020 for purposes including tracking changes to the environment and coastlines.

The former military airfield is also one of eight shortlisted by the UK government to launch commercial space flights. B2Space's Valentin Canales said about 3,000 micro satellites will need launching in the next five years as we "use space in a way that hasn't been considered before". His firm and the aerospace centre have bid for grants totalling £10m to make the field, near Harlech, a key UK site for this. Other possible uses for them include providing communications to remote areas or for natural disaster management.

The satellites will be launched from a stratospheric balloon with a self-operative platform. A three-stage rocket will then deliver them to the required orbits.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-40855358

The next great telescope

And so it begins. A new chapter in the glorious history of giant telescope mismanagement !

Among the western community of astronomers there are also questions about the scientific purpose of the FAST telescope. As part of a recent National Science Foundation review of its facilities, US officials placed the similar Arecibo radio telescope near the bottom of its priorities list.

Yes, but that's only because they're a bunch of feckin' idiots.

While FAST is larger than Arecibo, its effective size is not really 500 meters across because the instrument spends much of its time off zenith. Therefore the effective size is about 400 meters, compared to Arecibo's 300 meters.

Not quite true. FAST deforms its spherical mirror to form a parabola 300 m across. The deformation can be controlled so as to control where the dish is effectively pointing. Arecibo's solution is to use instruments which receive signal only from a ~225 m wide area of the dish, hence moving the instruments controls the pointing.

FAST has some advantage of slightly higher sensitivity* and resolution, but the main gain is that it has twice the sky coverage Arecibo does. But it's much more limited in terms of frequency coverage (by around a factor 3 IIRC). It's not yet known if it will be possible to upgrade this, because the accuracy with which the dish is deformed would need to be improved.

* Caveat - it might be more suited for wide-field surveys, depending on their instrument designs, but Arecibo could be upgraded substantially here.

Arecibo also has the capability to transmit radio waves, making it an effective tool to identify targets such as near-Earth asteroids. FAST is only a passive instrument.

And FAST will likely never have this capability, because radar transmitters are heavy. The deformable dish means FAST have a lightweight platform that can't carry as many instruments as Arecibo can. Arecibo can change instruments literally at the click of a mouse. For FAST this is a much more time-consuming operation.

https://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2017/08/china-built-the-worlds-largest-telescope-but-has-no-one-to-run-it/

The dystopian future is hilarious

Who knew robotic law enforcement would look this hilarious ? Help, I'm being chased by this cute little robot with googly eyes...

Independent evolution of the nervous system

Evolving a nervous system is easy-peasy

When scientists began examining the ctenophore nervous system in the late 1800s, what they saw through their microscopes seemed ordinary. A thick tangle of neurons sat near the animal’s south pole, a diffuse network of nerves spread throughout its body, and a handful of thick nerve bundles extended to each tentacle and to each of its eight bands of cilia... By stimulating the right nerves, researchers could even prompt its cilia to rotate in different patterns – causing it to swim forward or back.

In short, the ctenophore’s nerves seemed to look and act just like those of any other animal. So biologists assumed that they were the same. This view of ctenophores played into a larger narrative on the evolution of all animals – one that would also turn out to be wrong.

Moroz’s transcriptome and genomic DNA sequences showed that the ctenophore also lacked many other genes, known from the rest of the animal kingdom, that are crucial for building and operating nervous systems... It was missing genes that guide embryonic cells through the complex transformation into mature nerve cells. And it was missing well-known genes that orchestrate the stepwise connection of those neurons into mature, functioning circuits. ‘It was much more than just the presence or absence of just a few genes,’ he says. ‘It was really a grand design.’

It meant that the nervous system of the ctenophore had evolved from the ground up, using a different set of molecules and genes than any other animal known on Earth. It was a classic case of convergence: the lineage of ctenophores had evolved a nervous system using whatever genetic starting materials were available. In a sense, it was an alien nervous system – evolved separately from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Ctenophores provide an extreme, striking example of what is probably a general pattern: just as eyes, wings and fins evolved many times over the course of animal evolution, so too have nerve cells. Moroz now counts nine to 12 independent evolutionary origins of the nervous system – including at least one in cnidaria (the group that includes jellyfish and anemones), three in echinoderms (the group that includes sea stars, sea lilies, urchins and sand dollars), one in arthropods (the group that includes insects, spiders and crustaceans), one in molluscs (the group that includes clams, snails, squid and octopuses), one in vertebrates – and now, at least one in ctenophores.

https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-ctenophore-says-about-the-evolution-of-intelligence

This cat is coming for you

Found on the internet.

Bioglass

The accident had happened three years earlier. Since then, surgeons had desperately tried to reconstruct the bony floor and push the eye back into position, first using material implants and then bone from the patient’s own rib. Both attempts had failed. Each time, infection set in after a few months, causing extreme pain. And now the doctors were out of ideas.

Thompson’s answer was to build the world’s first glass implant, moulded as a plate which slotted in under the patient’s eye into the collapsed orbital floor. The idea of using glass – a naturally brittle material – to repair something so delicate may seem counterintuitive.

But this was no ordinary glass.

“When you put bioglass in the body, it starts to dissolve and releases ions which kind of talk to the immune system and tell the cells what to do. This means the body doesn’t recognise it as foreign, and so it bonds to bone and soft tissue, creating a good feel and stimulating the production of new bone.”

“Bioglass actually works even better than the patient’s own bone,” Thompson says. “This is because we’ve found that it slowly leaches sodium ions as it dissolves, killing off bacteria in the local environment. So, quite by chance, you have this mild antibiotic effect which eliminates infections.”

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170802-the-best-way-to-fix-broken-bones-might-be-with-glass

Solar freakin' roofs

Actually, it looks like a normal roof, which is a good thing.

The solar roof works out as cheaper than a new roof even before the energy savings brought by using the roof. When those are factored in, the roof starts to pay for itself.

Soon we shall have self-buying roofs...

These tiles are tough. They’re made of tempered glass, which makes them about three times stronger than slate or asphalt. On top of that, the tiles are capable of defrosting by using a similar method employed by anti-ice wires used in windshields. All this means the tiles are capable of working through extreme conditions.

Musk explained during the call that solar roof tile production should increase exponentially, in a similar fashion to Model 3 production. That means initial growth will be slow, followed by a sharp increase, and ending with a plateau, where Tesla produces a consistently high number of tiles per month. Even when production reaches its peak, though, it’s going to take a long time before every house has a solar roof.

“I think eventually almost all houses will have a solar roof,” Musk said during a May TED conference in Vancouver. “The thing to consider the timescale to be probably on the order of 40 for 50 years. On average, a roof is replaced every 20 to 25 years, but you don’t start replacing all roofs immediately, but eventually, if you were to fast forward to 15 years from now, it will be unusual to have a roof that doesn’t have solar.”

I suspect there's going to be strong regional variations in that average roof replacement time. 15 years will probably be closer to 50... though it will depend on just how quickly the roof is able to pay for itself.

https://www.inverse.com/article/35022-elon-musk-tesla-solar-roof-photos-amazing

New Horizons next target is a binary world

Based on these new occultation observations, team members say MU69 may not be not a lone spherical object, but suspect it could be an “extreme prolate spheroid” – think of a skinny football – or even a binary pair. The odd shape has scientists thinking two bodies may be orbiting very close together or even touching – what’s known as a close or contact binary – or perhaps they’re observing a single body with a large chunk taken out of it. The size of MU69 or its components also can be determined from these data. It appears to be no more than 20 miles (30 kilometers) long, or, if a binary, each about 9-12 miles (15-20 kilometers) in diameter.

Said Marc Buie, the New Horizons co-investigator who led the observation campaign, "These exciting and puzzling results have already been key for our mission planning, but also add to the mysteries surrounding this target leading into the New Horizons encounter with MU69, now less than 17 months away.”

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-next-target-just-got-a-lot-more-interesting

The 21cm line but not as we know it

Anti-hydrogen spectral lines ! Cool !

Hydrogen has its own spectrum and, as the simplest and most abundant atom in the Universe, it holds a special place in physics. The properties of the hydrogen atom are known with high accuracy. The one looked at in this paper concerns the so-called hyperfine splitting, which in the case of hydrogen has been determined with a precision of one part in ten trillion. This transition is used these days in modern navigation and geo-positioning.

The team have made antihydrogen by replacing the proton nucleus of the ordinary atom by an antiproton, while the electron has been substituted by a positron. Last year, in ground-breaking work published in Nature, the team used UV light to detect the so-called 1S-2S transition between positron energy levels. Now, the team has used microwaves to flip the spin of the positron. This resulted not only in the first precise determination of the antihydrogen hyperfine splitting, but also the first antimatter transition line shape, a plot of the spin flip probability versus the microwave frequency. If there is a difference between matter and antimatter, it could be found in tiny differences between this line shape in hydrogen and antihydrogen.

http://www.swansea.ac.uk/media-centre/latest-research/firstobservationofthehyperfinesplittinginantihydrogen.php

Merely giving people more and more facts does not give them understanding

Yesterday I removed from a certain community's spam folder a post consisting of 94 slides about some sterotypical pseudoscience theory. The usual stuff : "Let us begin with E = mc^2..."
No. Let's not do that, because it's obvious that you haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Lo and behold, it got rapidly worse, with some boiler-plate text praising God at the top of each slide. Aaaarrgggh. If you want to praise God, then fine, but do it in your own time, mate. Not in an internet-based slideshow you apparently expect people to read.

Total ignorance is indeed never damaging, providing one understands that one is totally ignorant and not put in a position where expertise might be required. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing as well. But a lot of knowledge without proper understanding is much, much worse.

Facebook says that actual facts are alternatives to alternative facts

Facebook is to step up its efforts to fight fake news by sending more suspected hoax stories to fact-checkers and publishing their findings online. It follows mounting criticism of the social media firm for not doing enough to root out fake news on its platform.

It has also just launched a new feature in four countries that will publish alternative news links beneath problematic articles. But several experts said the measures did not do go far enough. "Presenting audiences with context is helpful," said Tom Felle, a senior lecturer in digital journalism at City University. "But it does nothing to stop the spread of this material, or to stop traffic going to fake news peddlers who are making money out of creating this material."

On Thursday, however, the firm said it would start using "updated machine learning" to enhance detection. "If an article has been reviewed by fact checkers, we may show the fact-checking stories below the original post," added Sara Su, product manager of News Feed, in a blog. A spokesman later clarified that these stories would not be "direct responses" to fake articles, but factually accurate reports that offered an alternative.

HAH ! So the real facts have become themselves the alternatives. This sounds next to useless. I've a better idea. Whenever a story has been identified as potentially fake, present it along with a selection of actual proper factual articles (relating to the same subject) all displayed at the same font size, in a randomised order.
A future upgrade will present the user who clicks on the fake news story with an enormous, highly obnoxious pop-up full of gifs warning them that they're about to have their brain melted and that if they click this link they'll weaken their immune system and become less attractive to the opposite sex.
The next upgrade will replace the popup with a two hour video lecture on critical thinking and will include a randomised test at the end to ensure they actually watched it.
An additional upgrade will do exactly what it should be doing in the first place and take the damn things down.

I don't believe it's that hard to spot this stuff - at least, not the worst of it. Only excessive amounts of bullshitting has persuaded us that removing stories about Clinton being a murderer or the world being 6,000 years old is in some way a bad thing. It isn't. It's a wholly rational, sensible thing.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40812697

The NSFs plans for Arecibo are simply stupid

Edited for brevity.

Dear Stakeholders,

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has prepared a Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to assess the potential future use of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico under the condition of reduced funding of the Observatory by NSF.

This Final EIS identifies and analyzes the potential consequences of five action Alternatives:
Alternative 1 (Agency-preferred Alternative) would involve collaboration with new stakeholder(s) who would use and maintain Arecibo Observatory for continued science-focused operations at reduced funding by NSF.
Alternative 2 would involve collaborating with outside entities to operate and maintain Arecibo Observatory as an education-focused operation.
Alternative 3 would involve mothballing (preservation of) essential buildings, telescopes, and other equipment, with periodic maintenance to keep them in working order.
Alternative 4 would involve the demolition of all above-grade structures, except the large concrete structures (that is, towers, tower and catwalk anchors, and rim wall infrastructure).
Alternative 5 would involve the demolition of all above-grade structures, including the large concrete structures (that is, towers, anchors, and rim wall infrastructure).

The Final EIS also proposes mitigation measures to minimize the adverse impacts from demolition or operation of the Alternatives where such impacts may occur. NSF also considered the No-Action Alternative. Under the No-Action Alternative, NSF would continue funding the Arecibo Observatory at current levels; none of the Alternatives would be implemented.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Pentecost


Dear the National Stupid Foundation,

You are stupid. Why are you so stupid ? Do you have brain parasites ? Did the stupid fairy hit you on the head with a toaster, like that bit in Scrooged with Bill Murray ? I can't think of a more credible explanation right now, anyway.

Your "preferred action alternative", as you so eloquently call it, is supposed to maintain science operations at Arecibo. Commendable. Except that it explicitly calls for the demolition of up to 26 buildings including all the ones where the science gets done. You want to cut the NSF's funding and replace it with some other institute. Since you seem to be chronically stupid, that's probably a good thing. But how's about you don't force the theoretical replacement institute to have to rebuild all the frickin' buildings they're gonna need to maintain science operations, eh ? Booby trap them if you must, but what manner of witchcraft and sourcery compels you to think that demolishing science buildings will have any kind of positive impact on science is beyond me. Perhaps that's the key word : impact. Someone once told you you should increase the "impact" on science and you've taken them literally, because of the stupid fairy.

The other "action alternatives" aren't much better. Increasing the amount of education and outreach at AO is a very sensible idea; refocusing it so that it does nothing but education and outreach is not. You specifically call for, in this scenario, the 305m telescope to be rendered inoperable but not demolished, but "retained for visual/historical interest". Well great, let's all just hack our legs off while we're at it. I can think of few sights more discouraging to future astronomers than a vast telescope slowly decaying in the jungle, a sweeping curve of metal and soaring towers consumed back into the wild - save that all those who see it will know that this didn't have to happen. Perhaps the only benefit from this absurd idea would be that it would stand as a monument to the folly of small-minded bureaucrats.

There is not much to be said for the other possibilities. Mothballing the facility is only marginally better than blasting the thing to smithereens, which would at least win you the internet for a few hours. For the sake of a paltry, yes, paltry financial saving, you would end a scientific facility to which there is no comparable alternative, nor is one planned or ever likely to be planned.

In conclusion, you suck, you are stupid, and I don't like you.

Good day.
https://www.nsf.gov/mps/ast/env_impact_reviews/arecibo/arecibo_feis.jsp

I still don't believe in the hyperloop

It's nice to see video footage. But I'm still unconvinced this will be practical on a large scale. Even if the cost per mile could be made cheaper than railways (and I don't see how it can), the infrastructure costs will still be enormous. If they weren't, HS2 wouldn't be costing us >£50 billion. I suppose it may work in a few cases where's there's nothing but flat, hard wasteland between widely separated cities, but everywhere else ? Nah.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-40811172/hyperloop-one-passenger-pod-tested-successfully

Be careful what you wish for, morons

Honestly, there's stupid, and then there's Daily Fail stupid. Found on the internet.

Freedom of movement is good for workers

Freedom of movement of people reverses this proposition. It finally gives ordinary people rights – to organise for better conditions and better pay. No wonder Fox hates European free movement. It’s one of the only immigration systems in history where the ability to move is a human right, not a product of economic necessity, forcing people to meet the “needs” of business. While much could and should be said about the EU’s own barbaric immigration policy, the answer should not be to rescind these rights of ordinary people, but to extend them.

Exactly. Freedom of movement not only breaks down xenophobic barriers but forces local governments to ensure worker's rights are protected, otherwise workers can and do simply go elsewhere. The EU is not some tyrannical overlord that suppresses worker's rights, it's the exact opposite. Yes, it requires relinquishing some paltry powers of the sovereign nation state, but state control isn't a virtue in itself. It behoves a conservative-led state to reduce the individual's rights by denying them freedom of movement. The EU is a safeguard against overbearing states, not a sort of super-state that will swallow countries whole and somehow destroy their local traditions and cultures.

[Note also the EU legislation that foreign workers should be paid at the same level as equally skilled employees of their host nation, designed to make it less desirable to hire cheaper foreign labour.]

https://edition.independent.co.uk/editions/uk.co.independent.issue.020817/data/7871491/index.html

Brexiteers actually welcome suffering, for no reason I can understand

There are a few problems with the article. First and foremost :

A huge majority of older Leave voters say significant damage to the British economy is a “price worth paying” to secure Brexit, research shows are mad idiots.

There, fixed it.

No fewer than 71 per cent of over-65s are willing for the country to take a big economic hit – and half would accept a member of their own family losing their job.

But I mean seriously, don't they understand that economics pays for stuff ? You know, nice things like roads and hospitals and schools ? And that we need jobs because we quite like things like, say, food ?
EDIT : From the source, "half" refers to of those who said yes or no, excluding those who said, "don't know".

I do have one genuine critique mind you :

Only over-50s voted for Brexit last year.

That's a downright dumb statement, considering the same article just talked about younger leave voters as well. It's worthy of the Huffington Post, not the Indy (which has been a bit of a mixed bag of late).

However, YouGov also identified what it called Brexit extremism on the Remain side, with 34 per cent happy for the economy to suffer if that meant Brexit could be stopped.

That's a fair comparison, but I'd be surprised if Remainers believed that the economy would take a hit, making the question meaningless. Whereas I'd absolutely believe that Leavers believe it will take a hit, because it will.

EDIT : From the source (https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/08/01/britain-nation-brexit-extremists/) it's clearer :
a significant minority of Remain voters would be happy for the economy to suffer should it mean that Brexit were averted.
Ahh, well that indicates a potentially unfair comparison. Leaving will mean a permanent hit to the economy since there's absolutely no sensible replacement on offer for access to the single market. Whereas if the threat of leaving causes an economic hit which forces us to re-think, that hit is only temporary and the long-term damage averted.

Originally shared by Jenny Winder

#Brexit: Majority of older Leave voters say significant economic damage is 'price worth paying'
(For what?)
Only over-50s voted for Brexit last year!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest-leave-voters-uk-economy-damage-yougov-older-pensioners-losing-jobs-income-taxes-a7870871.html

The problem of identity in a teleporter

There's nothing new here, but it's nicely told.

Note: I make no claim to originality in this thought experiment. A very similar sort of question was raised in 1775 by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid...

Bah, Plato got to the heart of it in Cratylus :

Names would have an absurd effect on the things they name, if they resembled them in every respect, since all of them would be duplicated, and no-one would be able to say which was the thing and which was the name.

The concept of me being me, and not some weird collection of different parts with no intrinsic meaning, is something that I will cling to despite whatever fancy-schamncy arguments you want to bring to the table. Like the idea that time flows, I'm not prepared to consider anything else. Time is an illusion ? I'm not really me ? Pffft, whatever. Still interesting to think about though.

A toggle switch allows me to decide whether the ‘old me’ on Mars is preserved or destroyed after I teleport back home. It’s this decision that is causing me to hesitate.

I’m just the result of the activity among my 100 billion neurons and their 100 trillion distinctive connections. And, what’s more, that activity is what it is, no matter what collection of neurons is doing it. If you went about replacing those neurons one by one, but kept all the connections and activity the same, I would still be me. So, replacing them altogether at once should not matter, so long as the distinctive patterns are maintained. 

So: if I put the toggle in the ‘destroy’ setting, I should survive the transfer just fine. What would be lost? Nothing that plays any role in making me me, in making my consciousness my own. I should step in, press the button – and then walk out of the receiver back on Earth.


On the other hand, what happens if I put the toggle in the ‘save’ setting? Then where would I be? Would I make the trip back to Earth, and then feel sorry for the poor sap back on Mars (the old me), who will be facing slow death by starvation? Or – horrors! – will I be that old me, feeling envy for the new me who is now on Earth, enjoying the company of friends and family?

[My answer : the experience of being you is non-physical and non-replicable. This does not necessarily imply any kind of ghost in the machine (although I don't disregard that possibility) - if consciousness is an emergent, relational property, it must be relational between specific physical things. The neurons in the copy of you that emerges from the teleporter have no direct causal connection to the original neurons in your brain. Hence they're not you and you don't share their experiences : pressing the "destruct" button will kill you. The really interesting question is what the copy of you experiences. Do they emerge thinking that they're still you, as though they've teleported millions of miles in a few seconds with an unbroken awareness ? Or are they, somehow, aware that their experience is a different one from the original you ? A very serious and intelligent examination of this problem can be found here.]


https://aeon.co/ideas/if-i-teleport-from-mars-does-the-original-me-get-destroyed